Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

So, what? the Chief asked. She snorted it?

Doesn’t look like it , Danny said.

It didn’t matter. The Chief repeated this phrase. Greg and Tess were dead and nothing would bring them back. But the Chief hated to think that Tess had been high on something. Had Greg drugged her? Had he taken her out on a sail because he wanted to hurt her? She had been missing that hank of hair. But maybe he had been trying to save her. It didn’t matter, but it did matter. A sequence of events had unfolded out on the water and nobody knew what they were. They had both been drinking; Tess had been high. There was so much anger between them. But it was their anniversary and Andrea had made that picnic. Five calls from Addison in half an hour. See? The Chief ordered himself to stop thinking about it, but he couldn’t. And there was nobody to talk it over with.

Jeffrey, maybe. The Chief would think about it.

His phone buzzed. Molly, the dispatcher, said, “Chief, your son is on line three.”

He tucked the tox report into his desk drawer and locked it.

It was not a phone call he had hoped for. Eric said, “Mom has officially lost it.”

And the Chief, steeling himself, said, “What do you mean?”

“She smashed Greg’s guitar to bits in front of the twins, and now she’s locked herself in her room. The twins are crying.”

“Where’s Kacy?”

“She’s at work. I was getting ready to leave for work, too, but then Mom flipped out so I called the shop and told them I would be a little late.”

“Did something trigger your mother?”

Eric said, “Would you please come home?”

He had a ton of work to do. He had his entire summer force to place on their assignments for the Fourth of July. He had parking tape to secure, barriers to erect, and there was a party on Hulbert Avenue that former president Clinton would be attending, so he would be dealing with the Secret Service. The Chief had not even planned on taking a lunch, but now… Well, this didn’t sound like something he could ignore.

“I have to go out,” he told Molly. “Back shortly.”

Things at home were just as Eric had reported. The kids were in their bathing suits with towels around their necks, sitting in front of the television eating blindly from a bag of Fritos. Their breathing was ragged and hiccuppy. The guitar lay in the middle of the kitchen floor, smashed, its strings broken and haywire.

The Chief marched back to the bedroom. It was locked. He knocked once, to be considerate.

“Andrea? Open up.”

Nothing. His heartrate picked up. Andrea would never, ever do anything to hurt herself. She didn’t have it in her. But apparently she had it in her to do a Mötley Crüe destruction number on the guitar, which he would also have said was beyond the pale. He reached up to the lintel and pulled down the pin that would open the door.

He stepped inside. Andrea was on the bed facedown, her head under a landslide of pillows. She was wearing her black tank suit and a black, orange, and hot pink pareo that she had bought during their group trip to Sayulita, Mexico.

“Andrea?”

She didn’t move. She was, however, breathing. The Chief sat down next to her. His hands were ice-cold; he was afraid to touch her with such cold hands. He was afraid to touch her at all. She was formidable in her grief, terrifying. Anything he or the kids said or did could set her off-she would shout or berate them or start to cry so hard it resembled an epileptic seizure. It unnerved the kids-his own kids and Chloe and Finn-and it made the Chief feel both angry and helpless. Andrea was grieving more deeply than the rest of them because Tess had been her cousin and her best friend and everything else in between. There was guilt mixed in there, too, about the swimming accident twenty-six years earlier, about bringing Tess to Nantucket at all. I couldn’t save her, Ed! I couldn’t keep her safe! He heard her talking to him while he was falling asleep, but clearly he didn’t have the words to comfort her, because her sadness only grew worse and manifested itself in more disturbing ways.

Smashing Greg’s guitar against the kitchen countertop?

The Chief had tried, gently, to remind her that she was responsible for two more lives now-young, impressionable lives. She had demanded custody of the kids, she had requisitioned them, and now she had to raise them. She had to deal with her grief reasonably; she had to lead by example. If pressed to share his truest thoughts, the Chief would say that Andrea was not fit to bring up the twins, not right now. She should have let Delilah take them for the summer when Delilah offered. She would then have had the time and space to exorcise the demon of her grief.

“Andrea?” he said.

She didn’t respond. He lifted the pillows until she was exposed. Her eyes were open.

“I need help,” she said.

She had done the unthinkable.

An invitation had come for a Fourth of July party on Hulbert Avenue, a big, splashy party thrown by summer resident Caroline Nieve Masters, and Phoebe had accepted.

Caroline and Phoebe had served together on the board of directors of the Atheneum a decade earlier; they had been friends. In the intervening years, since September 11, when Phoebe resigned from the Atheneum board and the two other boards she sat on, she and Caroline had lost touch. There had been one awkward encounter when Caroline saw Addison and Phoebe out to dinner at 21 Federal, and she had approached the table cheerfully and asked Phoebe if she would consider sitting on the Circus Flora committee. Phoebe and Addison were out celebrating Phoebe’s thirty-fifth birthday, which was also Reed’s thirty-fifth birthday, but Reed would not be turning thirty-five because he was dust, and to compensate for this fact Phoebe had taken three valiums and, to numb herself further, one of the contraband pills that she had gotten from Brandon, which Brandon referred to only as the Number Nine. Throw in a glass and a half of the outrageously expensive Mersault that Addison had ordered to blur his own edges and you had Phoebe in such a haze that she was barely able to keep her head off the table. She looked at Caroline, but did not see her. She spoke, but did not say anything intelligible.

Caroline seemed confused. Addison said, “Phoebe is trying to keep her plate clear these days.”

Caroline said of course, she understood, and beat a hasty retreat. Phoebe had not heard from her since, and had seen her only in passing. Just like the rest of the women from her previous life.

So the invitation came as a surprise. And even more unlikely was the burst of anticipation Phoebe felt. She wanted to go to this party. She asked Addison if they could go to Caroline Masters’s party on the Fourth and he looked at her dully, then shrugged. Addison was the emotionally hobbled one now. Since Greg and Tess had died, he had done little more than drink whiskey, stare out the window, and cry in his sleep.

Phoebe couldn’t help him. He was on his own. Phoebe had not been able to grieve for Greg and Tess since her outburst in the Galley parking lot. She had used up her sadness and horror and now she was empty. If anything, she felt better than she had in years. It was backward. She felt almost normal. She looked at her bottles of scrips and thought, I really don’t need these. But she took them anyway, just in case.

The best thing about Caroline Masters’s party was that it would be a reprieve from the torrent of misery about Tess and Greg. Caroline Masters hadn’t known Tess and Greg, and her fancy New York friends and Nantucket summer neighbors hadn’t known Tess and Greg, nor did they know that Phoebe had lost friends named Tess and Greg. Phoebe would be free.